Rajnath Singh walks the razor’s edge

Within a fortnight of the start of his second stint as the president of the BJP, Rajnath Singh made four kinds of moves to stamp his own cachet of leadership on his party. He sought, in the first place, to seek reconciliation with those of his senior colleagues with whom he has had frosty relations in the past. He then reached out to potential trouble-makers in the states. Armed with his impeccable RSS credentials, he also began to take on board outfits of the extended sangh parivar that have felt uneasy about attempts by certain BJP leaders to keep them at a safe distance from the activities of the party. And finally, he emerged as the party’s main, if not exclusive, voice to challenge the Congress for its real or perceived failures.

What helped Rajnath Singh to assert his authority so swiftly? One reason surely relates to his squeaky-clean image. It does not bear the slightest taint of a misdemeanour. Not even his bitterest rival can accuse him of moral or financial wrong-doing. Indeed, with every passing day, he presents a picture of rectitude that stands in sharp contrast to the bruised image of Nitin Gadkari, his predecessor in office.

The second has to do with the lessons he has learnt from his successes and failures during 2005-2009 when he presided over the party’s fortunes. The successes include major gains for the party in the 2006 municipal elections in Uttar Pradesh, victory in the 2007 legislative elections in Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Punjab (in an alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal) and more triumphs in the 2008 assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and especially Karnataka which allowed the BJP to open its account in south India. As against this, disasters marked the beginning and end of his first term in office: in the 2006 assembly polls, the BJP had to bite dust in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry just as the BJP-led NDA faced defeat in the 2009 general elections.From this mixed record Rajnath Singh appears to have concluded that, first and foremost, he needed to keep the fractious BJP flock together. Individual leaders had every right to aspire for high office. But that should not be at the expense of the party’s unity. He has therefore gone out of his way to mend fences with them. They include L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Yeshwant Sinha and, above all, Narendra Modi. His leadership, he has tried to convince them in substance, will be collegial in nature.

At the same time, he done some damage control in Karnataka by ensuring that B.S. Yediyurappa’s revolt does not lead to the collapse of the BJP government barely three months before the next assembly polls. This gives him a small window of opportunity to entice the influential Lingayat leader back into the party fold. He may yet fail but he could well run that risk given the fact that all that Yediyurappa wants is a swift return to power, not a change of policies or ideology.

The new BJP president is on firmer ground with the decision to name Vasundhara Raje as the chief of the party in Rajasthan and to appoint Gulab Chand Kataria as leader of the opposition in the state assembly. Though much delayed, the move by the central leadership to acknowledge Raje’s proven leadership qualities will go some way to bolster the BJP’s campaign for the forthcoming assembly elections in the state. By that same token, it will allow the elements ranged against Raje to hold their horses.

On managing relations with the RSS, the party’s ideological mentor, and with other sangh parivar outfits like the VHP, Rajnath Singh has been walking on the razor’s edge. He would want to avoid giving any impression that he is at odds with these outfits on core ideological issues: the Ram temple at Ayodhya, Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code. At the same time, he would not want these issues to overshadow other core political issues: good corruption-free governance, development, a tough stand on security and so forth. Reconciling these two objectives is decidedly a tall order. But Rajnath Singh doubtless knows that the alternative – to throw in the party’s lot with either one or the other – will be a path to perdition.

It has been suggested in many quarters that the way out of this dilemma is for the BJP is to set aside the issue of the party’s prime ministerial candidate by projecting the Narendra Modi-Rajnath Singh duo as its mascot. By this reckoning, Modi will appeal to the middle-class and the urban youth, while Singh, a Rajput with a wide appeal among farmers, will swing the rural vote in North India, and especially in the critical state of UP. But this begs the question: who is prepared to play second fiddle to the other? It also begs two others: who is better placed to retain NDA allies and lure new ones? And will either of them manage to convince at least some sections of minorities that the party’s soft Hindutva-cum-development formula will benefit them more than the secular-cum- inclusive growth of the Congress?

So the road between now and the general elections is bound to be full of pot-holes. To negotiate them would require vast reserves of political imagination. Whether Rajnath Singh and the top leadership of the BJP are able to summon that imagination is going to remain a moot point, not least because its main rival, the Congress, under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership, has begun in right earnest to show signs of rejuvenation. Both parties, in the plainest of words, can ignore the stirrings in the other camp at their own risk and peril.